I came across this post one evening not long ago, while scrolling through posts and pictures. I read it once over, quickly, as one does when they are just wasting time trying to fall asleep. My finger began to swipe up naturally, but caught for a moment with enough time for me to read through the post once more.
It didn’t surprise me, didn’t give me any reason to pause and wonder about the accuracy in the statements. I just knew that all of it made sense to me and the life I’ve lived and the shoes I’ve walked in. I don’t know a single woman that never moved more quickly or glanced more frequently to preserve her own safety. And if I do, forgive me for the assumption, and I will gladly revise my statement to say: I hardly know any women that this post doesn’t apply to.
In reading the words, my mind found itself stuck in several memories, from the time my body took on a womanly form until present day. Most prominently, I thought about my time in college and the late evening classes that I recall clearly doing every single one of the tactics mentioned. I remember news reports of serial rapists frequenting areas around the school. I remember the near empty parking structure where I would hold my keys between my fingers as a makeshift weapon in case I had to strike an attacker with something sharp. I can’t tell you where I learned such a behavior. Somewhere in a young girl’s timeline, she just learns that there could be a day where fighting back is the only option she has. In the parking structure, I could hear the echoes of other people, and without knowing who they were or where they were headed, the imagined images of them in my mind were full of malice. I walked swiftly and surely to get to my car before they got to me. I did what I was supposed to when I arrived at my car: glanced around it, and even underneath, looked over my shoulders, looked everywhere, quickly opened the car, jumped in, and hastily closed and locked the door.
Around the same time, or somewhere within the vicinity of a few years, I remember various reports of women getting pulled over by police officers late at night, and then being assaulted by the officer. There was a resolution of mind that even those that were meant to help, maybe would not, and would possibly instead harm. More fear. More intimidation. More anger that I had to always be alert to the potential of certain men.
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When I was only sixteen or seventeen, a friend and I sat outside of the Dairy Queen, eating ice cream. An obviously intoxicated man pulled up in his truck, stepped outside, leaving the truck running with the headlights on. He walked in front of the headlights, dropped his pants, grabbed his penis and looked directly at us. We ran into the Dairy Queen laughing at what happened. They were the uncomfortable laughs of young women learning that in matters of sex, things could be down right weird.
When I was twenty one, and walking down the street, a maybe thirteen year old boy ran past and slapped me on the ass as his friends cheered him. I called him a “little shit” or something like that, but grinned at my own friends. Harmless, after all, right?
When I was twelve, a boy in my middle school Social Studies class made a joke about my breasts (or really lack thereof at the time.) I laughed. Because what was I supposed to do? So I laughed and inside I shrunk just a little bit more.
As I developed into womanhood there were many moments like these. Some are more serious than others. Some are more influential than others. Some words stuck in my brain, rattling around forgotten until moments when they sprung up again, reminding me that some words are never really forgotten. Some actions stuck around as well, like the ones mentioned above. What seems harmless, or non threatening, or like boys being boys becomes wearisome after a while to a young woman. It becomes irritating, until at some point, the woman realizes she doesn’t have to put up with that crap.
And then she learns that she has to fear walking in the world. She is instructed to carry her keys with the pointy ends sticking out between her fingers. She is told to check and recheck and stay alert as she walks … anywhere. And she grows up, and believes that her place in the world is not as secure as a mans, that she is vulnerable. Of course she meets wonderful men that are good and kind and decent. She learns to trust them, deciphering which men are good and which men are not. The good men are great, but this isn’t about them. They should be good. Rewards won’t be given for men that don’t assault women, because the constant should be that men don’t assault women.
But the bad ones. The ones that maybe learned from a very young age that they could speak to girls and women as if they are a joke, that learned they could touch girls or women in any way they found fun, that grew up to expose themselves or hideout in parking garages looking for their next victim, these guys learned that their sex was superior and therefore more powerful. They learned somewhere and somehow that aggression towards women is acceptable.
I am hopeful though. Our society is in the process of unlearning these lessons, and unlearning bad behavior takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of us women, telling our stories, talking about how it seemed normal to feel devalued, and how we aren’t willing for that to feel normal anymore.
Rachael Coughlin 